William Keach. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-06

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William Keach. Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. 191. $42.00.

In his ambitious and brilliantly argued new book, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics, William Keach surveys familiar terrain--the politics of canonical British Romantic poetry--with a sense of purpose that follows directly from the terms of his title. The political dimensions of Romantic poetry are rigorously studied here within the medium of language, considered first through Romantic and earlier Enlightenment linguistic theories, and then through the traces that such theories (and the concerns they raised) may be said to have left on the style of the major Romantic writers. In an earlier book, Shelley's Style (1984), Keach established himself as one of our most sensitive and insightful readers of Romantic writing. In welcoming the wider scope of this new study--in addition to Shelley, there are sustained considerations of Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, and Keats--readers will find that Keach is as discriminating a student of class idioms and gender codes as he is of couplet structure and ottava rima form. He is also refreshingly direct about matters of literary-political value, and his willingness to admire Byron's materialism and Shelley's hesitation about direct action while taking a dim view of Blake's representations of political violence may well prove controversial. But the array of sensitive readings marshaled in support of closely argued judgments make this book impossible to ignore. At one point Keach takes Francis Jeffrey to task for a "vaguely generalizing" (53) response to Keats' Endymion: by contrast, he himself seems incapable of any critical response that is not as precisely formulated as it is vividly communicated.

The opening chapter, "Arbitrary Power," introduces the central term that links power and language throughout the book, along with a telling paradox about its application and historical development. For it turns out that...

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